The sweeping Pitt/Blanchett Christmas blockbuster is generating big Oscar buzz, but most of the buzz I heard during the show was generated by a uniformly gray-haired crowd, striving to explain to one another what was going on. As the show progressed, they inched ever closer to the screen in hopes that they might catch Benjamin Button’s curious reverse-aging disease (or at least their spouses would).

But you don’t have to be geriatric to enjoy Button’s saga. Even the pure visual spectacle was enough to hold my attention for the 2 hour and 55 minute running time. If no one else is a shoe-in for the Oscar, Pitt’s makeup artist certainly has it nailed down. He presents us a very convincing 70-year-old Pitt at the start and subtly freshens him, taking him past the youthful lad he was in 1992’s A River Runs Through It to a scrawny teenager (who, being Brad Pitt, still gets laid). Cate Blanchett’s aging is almost as impressive, and the cinematography is full of sweeping historical panoramas, softly lit, but not quite to the schmaltzy saturation of Titanic.